Thanks for the new wall paper, very cool.

Thanks, Warren. If I could lift my telescope, I'd be watching the sun every day. Beautiful! [Addition/Edit] The neatest video I ever got was watching the partial solar eclipse in Southern Cal (~91) was getting an airplane from DIA in it. Very cool! We lived a couple of miles from Rocketdyne, and my ex-wife came cross a couple of notebooks, my favorite is an H-1 Rocket Engine notebook... without all the good stuff. But it is a notebook I treasure… probably has electronics in it though. I could have jogged to Rocketdyne! Nah, well, kinda, checked it… NASA soldering techniques. Crud/cool.

When I was a boy scout and ham, I got to take NASA's space soldering school at RCA's David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton, NJ. I still have the training book somewhere. All kinds of stuff like little kinks in resistor leads. In retrospect, it was 3 days spread over a month and so it likely wasn't the whole class, but I did learn to do a decent job on soldering to terminals and through-hole stuff. This surface mount stuff is too new-fangled for me though - aside from the fact that I can't see or pick up the damn parts.

Very cool, Warren. Stiffest standards, as you know. I made telemetry transmitters in the late 60's with a soldering gun, of all things, until my Dad bought me a soldering iron. Made quite a difference. 🙄

The surface mount stuff isn't too bad IF you have a good binoc-scope, fine tweezers, very fine point Metcal, and good flux. I can do 0402 components pretty easily, but get too messy on fine pitch (<.5mm) packages, though!
-Ken

I got a hot-air rework tool a few months ago, and since then I haven't used my soldering iron much. You can squeeze out some solder paste through a syringe, smear it over all the pads, and it will ball up and go to the right places like magic once you hit it with some heat.

The surface mount stuff isn't too bad IF you have a good binoc-scope, fine tweezers, very fine point Metcal, and good flux. I can do 0402 components pretty easily, but get too messy on fine pitch (<.5mm) packages, though!
-Ken

I used to be able to do even the finest pitch SMT compnents, had to. I have a bunch in the garage, that I keep planning to use. 😉 Although I really like the sound of that hot air rework station, Edward.